LUAN VAN TOM TAT new doc MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING THE UNIVERSITY OF DANANG NGUYỄN THÁI MỸ IÊN A STUDY OF THE LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF ADJECTIVES DESCRIBING WOMEN’ S CHARACTERISTICS IN ENGLISH[.]
Trang 1MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING THE UNIVERSITY OF DANANG
NGUYỄN THÁI MỸ IÊN
A STUDY OF THE LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF ADJECTIVES DESCRIBING WOMEN’ S CHARACTERISTICS IN ENGLISH VERSUS
Trang 2The thesis has been completed at the College of Foreign
Languages, University of Da Nang
Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr Phan Văn Hòa
Examiner 1: Dr Nguyễn Quang Ngoạn
Examiner 2: Assoc Prof Dr Lưu Quý Khương
The thesis will be orally defended at the Examining Committee
Time : August 25th , 2012
Venue: University of Danang
The original of thesis is accessible for the purpose of reference
at the College of Foreign Languages Library, and the Information Resources Center, Da Nang University
Trang 3CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 RATIONALE
English language is one of the most popular and widely spoken languages in the world Once you master the rules of English grammar, understanding and learning the language is much easier There are a large number of words in the English language, and all these words can be classified into the eight parts of speech which are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions and interjections They are all form the backbone of English grammar and composition
According to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English [21],
an adjective is “a word that describes a noun or pronoun” In the phrase a beautiful girl, “beautiful” is an adjective and in the sentence It makes her
happy, “happy” is an adjective.” The definition is very concise but we can
have a general opinion of what can be called an adjective from examples given there However, in Webster’s online dictionary [29], the definition of adjectives is much more detailed An adjective is defined like this: a word used with a noun, or substantive, to express a quality of the thing named, or something attributed to it, or to limit or define it, or to specify or describe a thing, as distinct from something else
In order to have a general look about adjective and adjecitve
describing women characteristics, I decide to research the topic “A Study of Linguistic Features of Adjective Describing Women Characteristics in English versus Vietnamese” with the hope of
contributing the necessary background to the learning and teaching of English, especially giving learners a general view in achieving effective communication and translation
1.2 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
Trang 41.2.2 Objectives of the study
The study is intended to:
- To describe semantic and morphological features of adjectives describing women’s characteristic in Vietnamese
- To describe semantic and morphological features of adjectives describing women’s characteristic in Vietnamese
- Make a contrast of features of adjectives describing women’s characteristics in English and Vietnamese
1.3 RESEARCH QUESTION
The paper is to answer the following questions:
- What are semantic and morphological features of adjectives describing women’s characteristics in Vietnamese?
- What are semantic and morphological features of adjectives describing women’s characteristics in English?
- What are the similarities and differences in semantic and morphological features of adjectives describing women’s characteristics in English and Vietnamese?
1.4 SCOPE OF THE STUDY
Generally when we describe person we must describe all aspects such as: personality, behavior, character, appearance and
Trang 5felling But in this paper I forcus on women’s characteristics in both neagative and possive sides
1.5 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY
The study consists of the five main chapters as follows:
Chapter 1: Includes the rationale, the aims and objectives, the research
questions, significance, the scope and the organization of the study
Chapter 2: Literature review and theoretical background, includes
prior studies ralated to this thesis
Chapter 3: Consists of the research design and methodology Based on
the aims and objetives mentioned above, the research questions, the research methodology, the data collection and analysis, and the procedures are established Validity and reliabitliy are also mentioned
Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion deals the investigation into
adjectives denoting women’s characteristics in the two languages Also the similarites and differences
Chapter 5: Conclusion and impications gives the summary of the study
and offers some implications on the teaching and learning English and Vietnam as a foreign language
CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1 REVIEW OF PREVIOUS STUDIES
In English, there are diverse adjectives whose frequency of use
is very high Quirk and Greenbaum (1998) [26] studied the formation and classification of English languages adjectives In fact, adjective can
be found in almost every sentences of whatever length
Haas [13], Cruse [5], Crystal [6], Richard et.al [28], Asher [1]
Trang 6and Delahunty & Grayvey [37] studied adjecitves lay a basic foundation for futher studies, which solve a wide range of problems such as meaning, word meaning, semantic field, sematic features, pragmatic features of word or componential analysis
Many researchers have paid much attendtion to adjectives such as: Eckercley [11] Chalker [7], Jeffries [18], Collins [4], Huddleston and Pullum [46]… However, these studies have so far discovered the most general description and classification of English adjectives, which related to their definition, formation, function and types only
Besides, there are some papers studied on adjectives: Lam Thuy Dung (2006) [9] investigated the intensification adjective in Eglish language in a contrastive views with the Vietnamese ones Trần Thị Thu Giang (2008) [12] studied on meaning of Bad Pham Thi Anh Hang 2011 [14] studied on some aspects of social life as well as social differences that men and women behavior in everyday life Tran Quang Long (2011) [22] described characteristic both men and women
As usual, when we mention about the characteristic of women
we often use some adjectives denoting good characteristic In this paper, the writer will give all characteristic even though bad characteristic of women
2.2 THEORY BACKGROUND
2.2.1 Definition of adjective
Quirk and Greenbaum and Quirk et al defined adjective is a word that describes a person or thing and tell you about more about a noun
a English Adjectives
* Characteristics of Adjectives in English
After nouns and verbs, adjectives are the largest word class in
Trang 7English According to Quirk et al [27] and Biber et al [3], adjectives are defined in terms of morphology, syntax, and semantics
+ Morphological Characteristics
Morphologically, many adjectives can be inflected to show
degree of comparison, as in tall, taller, and tallest However,
inflectional comparison is restricted
+ Syntactic Characteristics
Syntactically, adjectives can occur as the head in adjective
phrases, e,g really happy, wilting to listen, and familiar with the local area
Typically, they can serve both attributive and predicative syntactic function
+ Semantic Characteristics
According to Biber [3], semantically, adjectives are descriptive, typically characterizing the referent of a nominal expression In other words, adjectives, typically, describe qualities of
people, things, and states of affairs, e.g blue and white flag, unhappy
childhood
Many adjectives have a classifying, identifying, or
intensifying meaning: medical student, identical car, utter amazement
These adjectives are normally ungradable, and they do not allow comparison and degree modification
* Classes of Adjectives in English
+ Semantic Classification of Adjectives
Semantically, according to Alexander [2] and Quirk et al [27], adjectives can be divided into two classes A large number of adjectives
form a class called gradable adjectives The others form a smaller class called ungradable adjectives or non-gradable adjectives
Trang 8[12, p.254]
Gradable adjectives are those whose meaning can be thought
of in terms of a scale and they represent a point on a scale
On the contrary, ungradable adjectives represent the limits of a
scale [41], or denote categorical or determative properties, e.g
linguistic, atomic [3]
+ Syntactic Classification of Adjectives
Both attribitve are majority and constitute the central adjectives Most can be used either attributively or predicatively without any change in meaning:
a beautiful girl - The girl is beautiful
A few adjecitves can take on a different meaning when used attributively
· Attributive Adjectives
Adjectives that are attributive but not predicative include chief
elder, eldest, eventual, former, indoor, inner, main, mere, only, etc
E.g: That reason was main
· Predicative Adjectives:
These adjectives consist of some with prefix a- such
as asleep, awake, alive, afraid, ashamed, alone, alike, some expressing feelings such as content and sony, and some describing health such as well, fine, ill, and unwell
b Vietnamese Adjectives
* Characteristics of Adjectives in Vietnamese
In Vietnamese, an adjective follows the noun which it
modifies, e.g Cái nhà lớn (a big house) and bà già (an old lady)
According to Diep Quang Ban [30], adjectives in Vietnamese can occur not only as postmodifiers of nouns but also as postmodifiers
of verbs, e.g đi nhanh, and nói chậm
Trang 9When functioning as verb postmodifiers, they can be preceded
by 'một cách” for instance:
Trong từng chương một Kiên viết về chiến tranh một cách rất tùy ý…
[52, p.53] However, this rule cannot apply to adjectives functioning as
noun postmodifiers, e.g cái nhà một cách lớn
* Classes of Adjectives in Vietnamese
According to Diep Quang Ban [30], Vietnamese adjectives can
be divided into two classes, adjectives of quality and adjectives of
relation, based on the quality and relation denoted by the adjectives
Besides, based on gradability, they can be classified into two groups:
gradable adjectives and ungradable adjectives
+ Gradable Adjectives
Gradable adjectives in Vietnamese can collocate with adverbs
of degree such as rất, hơi, khí, quá, cực kỳ, lắm ect., eg: rất đẹp, vui quá, and anh dũng cực kỳ
a Adjectives as Noun Phrase Modifiers
b Adjectives as Predicate Adjectives
c Adjectives as Object Complements
2.2.3 Semantic Feature
Semantics is defined as “the study of meaning” That is, it
Trang 10usually deals with the lexical/word meaning, sentence meaning and sometimes utterance meaning in discourse or a whole text
2.2.4 Pragmatic theory
a Pragmatics
b Implication
CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURES
This chapter aims at dealing with research questions, method
and procedures of the study It is composed of the presentation of the methods used in the course of the thesis which support each other in investigating data and finding the results It also mentions the procedures in which the problems related to the study are solved, getting the final results
describing women’s characteristics in English In order to reach the
aims quanlitative, quantitative, descriptive and comparative methods are employed
The frist method will deal with the description of ADWC in English and in Vietnamese and the second one with the comparison of
the adjectives describing women’s characteristics in the two languages
The third method helps to find out the similarities and diffenrnces in semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features between the adjectives
Trang 11describing women’s characteristics in English and those in Vietnamese
The last one is adopted to produce statistics on the distribution of
adjectives describing women’s characteristics in English and in
Vietnamese
3.1.2 Data Collection
The data collection was carried out with sentences containing ADWCs Two corpora, English corpus and Vietnamese one, containing around 450 ADWCs in both spoken and written discourse were established Samples were selected from English and Vietnamese stories and novels Magazines and newspapers also provided useful data More specifically, the data were collected from the following sources:
Both English and Vietnamese data were taken from stories, novels, magazines and newspapers which were written or published in the late twentieth century and in the early twenty-first century
The data in English were taken from stories, novels, and magazines which were published in English-speaking countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom and The United States of America
The data in Vietnamese were taken from stories and novels by Vietnamese writers, and from magazines and newspapers published in Vietnam
3.1.3 Data Analysis
After being picked out from the chosen material, the samples of adjective intensification were thoroughly examined and classified Following this, the English and Vietnamese corpora were described and analyzed to enable the comparison to find out similarities and differences in terms of semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features between ADWCs in English versus Vietnamese
Trang 123.1.4 Procedures
The procedures adopted involve the following steps
- posing research questions
- collecting and classifying samples
- describing, analyzing and comparing the two corpora
- finding out similarities and differences in semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features between AIDs in English and those in Vietnamese
- discussing the findings
3.1.5 Validity and Reliability
The sampling was done with the selection of ADWCs used in stories, novels, magazines and newspapers Since they are genres that reflect real world and contain various topics, they are fertile sources of ideas, feelings, etc In other words, they are rich in examples of adjectives so different kinds of ADWCs can be found Besides, the data were collected from authentic material Therefore, research results achieved are considered to be reliable enough However, with the sample population of approximately 450 the results cannot be perfectly reliable
With the methods used, the results obtained are hoped to be valid enough
3.2 SUMMARY
This chapter presents the research design and methodology First, the research questions are raised Second, the research methodology is mentioned Next, the process of data collection and analysis is described Then, the procedure for the research is established Validity and reliability are also mentioned In brief, this chapter is a guide to the main focus of the research in the next chapter
Trang 13CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 4.1 SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF THE ADJECTIVE DESCRIBING WOMEN’S CHARACTERISTICS IN ENGLISH
As you know, this thesis studies on adjectives describing women’s characteristic both in negative and positive sides In this part of thesis, we will deal with analysic adjectives based on three main functions:
· adjectives as a noun phrase modifier
· adjectives as a predicate
· adjectives as object complement
4.1.1 ADWCs as a Noun Phrase Modifier
The first function that adjective can perform is the noun phrase modifiers Noun phrase modifiers are defined as words, phrases and
clauses that describe a noun and noun phrase Like attributive when it
premodifies nouns, it appears between the determiner and the head of the noun phrase
[4.1] Mr Bingley was good-looking and gentlemanlike: he had a
pleasant countenance, and easy, unaffected manners His sisters
were fine women, with an air of decided fashion [42, p.11]
4.1.2 ADWCs as a Predicate
ADWCs can be a a subject complement when it occurs after
“be” or “linking verbs” such as: “seem”, “feel” “turn”, “go”, “smell”,
“look”, “get”, “grow”, ect, and describes the sbuject of the sentences or
a state change of the subject of the sentences
For example:
[4.8a] She was self-possessed and walked with a dignity that surpassed
even Mammy’s, for Mammy had acquired her dignity and Dilcey’s was in her blood [49, p35]